Portal to the Future: The Internet and the Development of a Global Utopia

By Enmar & The Hawk .

A vision of a future society, of a unified, global unit, has been the goal and the dream of all cultures. It forms the comparison between all political concepts, for it is the vision of the form of the good writ large. It also exposes the heart of the problem we face when we try to dream our future – for our dreams are very different.

The future will not look like any of those monocultural dreams. It is going to be the result of an integration process between cultures and new ideas that will emerge with time. It is very hard for us to foresee the future because we are blinded by our present realities, by the restrictions of our moral structures, by our ties to our past through history and through languages. We can neither see through the eyes nor feel through the hearts of the future people - they will have different values and perspectives on things. It is enough to look at the radical changes of the twentieth century to see how much the global perspective has been altered.

The fact that we can not see the future does not release us from our responsibility to it, nor our stewardship over it. The way we conduct ourselves today determines the paths people will be able to choose from in the future. We may not be able to bridge the cultural and religious gaps among us, but we can take the first step in the right direction by acknowledging differing religious and cultural backgrounds not as 'others', but as being like ourselves.

The Internet presents us, for the first time in history, an opportunity to cross paths with people very different from us. In a way unforeseen in fiction or in history, we have the ability to see diversity and commonality in basic human drives and beliefs, to care about conflicts that take place thousands of kilometers away, and above all, to make genuine friends outside our limited offline community, with those people who are not so similar to us as those with whom we share our living space.

The Internet can help us make the first step on the journey to a global consciousness, but it will not come into existence unless we harness it expressly for the purpose of building diversity, understanding, and change through its digital means. The portals of the Internet are the first doors through which the global consciousness of utopia will pass. Without that passage, without that understanding in the spirit of our responsibility to the future, change on a global scale is impossible.

Two people, two nations, two cultural civilizations, fight each other on the very edge of the water at low tide. The tide, stained with the pollution of their war, soon begins to flow about them. Ignorant of the rising waves around them, so focused on their adversary that prevailing is their only concern, they will drown together. An observant outsider will offer them words of warning, attempt to alert them to their imminent and mutual destruction, but nothing will come of it. Both warriors know what they are facing, the principles and ideals they defend in the face of their opponent are important enough, and so they choose to risk all. This is the nature of principles, of loyalty, of the hope embodied in such a struggle – they leave very little place for reasoning other than their own.

In many ways the two struggling are closer to each other than the detached observer. They fight for the same cause, the same piece of land, the same hope for the same future. They could relate to each other’s urgency and fear in another forum, in another time. They both hold their struggle as of critical importance, and no outsider will be able to effectively communicate with either of them before showing respect and understanding to their feelings and motivation. Even though they’re so similar to each other, there’s no such understanding between them. Both have demonized the other to such an extent that they cease to exist as human beings, and exist only as the evil which they fight

People with ideas that seem strange to us have a reason and a tradition to support them. We don’t have to agree with these ideals, but they deserve genuine interest and respect, to be understood. We must remember that our ideas are not as trivial as they seem to us – they’re just as strange for people confronted with them for the first time. This way conflicts will be what they really are – deep, bitter and critical disagreements, but not an open war with our ultimate devils.

The border lines that define these devils, as drawn between ethnic groups, religions, political powers and civilizations, typically overlap – we will use the term ‘cultures’ to describe them, but we mean the complex entities that have these things in common despite other differences. In every culture, these ideas come together to take on an ideal form, their common vision of Utopia.

Even the word itself – Utopia - betrays its origins. The word is a Latin term, meaning 'no-land', where ‘land’ is used in the political sense. Political lands continue to exist only in comparisons and by contrast, not as entities unto themselves. 'No land' translates into an absence of contradiction, of the political ‘other’ – only one land, one grand political entity, that will turn obsolete and disappear. We are told that the way to realizing any utopia is not easy, for it would already exist if not so difficult to attain. The road to utopia is paved with painful compromise and bitter sobering, and the very concept of ‘utopia’ is a transparent cage for the western mind.